The other day I had a hairy experience on the stretch of highway between Lunenburg and Mahone Bay. I was coming home after an eye exam when a thought struck me for a new design. Inspiration is like an open tap, it keeps flowing. Some ideas are just fillers that are easily forgotten, but some are hot as molten lava and need immediate recording. So I pulled into the Black Forrest Restaurant parking lot to make a couple of notes on my phone. It was raining pretty hard and the wipers were on high so the conditions were slippery and warranted caution. I put on my signal, rolled the car ahead a bit to get close enough to pull out on the highway, stopped and looked out of my driver’s side window for approaching cars. There was one close enough for me to wait my turn and after it went by I looked again and saw vehicle lights but they were a distance away. So I pulled out but respectfully floored it so the approaching driver didn’t have to slow down if he caught up with me as there is nothing more annoying than drivers who creep out onto a road and then take forever to get up to speed. When I looked in my rear view mirror, I was horrified to see a purple box truck bearing down on me at high speed. We were quickly approaching a very sharp 30 km. turn to the right. It’s always been a hairy corner to maneuver, especially in winter conditions or torrential downpours. The turn is so blind it should have a white cane on the sign. That corner has always made me nervous, mostly because of the deer population along this road. If you don’t see at least a dozen deer on either leg of the trip, you aren’t looking out the window! Taking a sharp corner blind you always wonder what might be standing in the road, or worry there might be a speeder taking the corner too wide because there’s no place to go but the ditch. Hubby and I hit a deer one night, luckily not a serious accident but traumatic all the same and it comes flooding back every time I’m on that road. So I am only about 10 yards from making the turn when this box truck that had to be traveling at upwards of 100 km, was now on my rear bumper. I could see its massive structure in my rear view mirror and wondered it would ram my car like you see in the movies. At the last second, the truck whipped out and passed me. We were so close to the turn he couldn’t get back to the right side of the road because my car was in the way, so he took the turn on the left lane, straight into oncoming traffic if there were any vehicles heading towards us. There was no way he could tell if a car was coming or not so he was gambling…..car or no car, a 50/50 chance. Not great odds. Horrified, I'd slammed on my breaks to avoid being part of a crash. The box truck successfully made the turn and sped out of sight. I was shaken. Then my blood began to boil. Sure I know thinking about “what if” can make you crazy but really, the luck of not a single car on that well-traveled patch of road was mind boggling! It was everyone's lucky day who traveled on that road shortly before and after. Like the country song says, "Timing Is Everything". A regular sized car would not have fared well in a head on collision if the driver didn't have a heart attack as that big purple menace came straight at them. The truck driver probably wouldn’t have survived either but we won’t worry about him. That’s one of those cases where saying a person who died is a loss, might be premature. Maybe it was someone society could afford to lose because he was either an idiot or insane. Playing Russian roulette with other people’s lives is an unfair game. If you want to play with fire, go home, load a gun and shoot yourself....if you miss, reload and try again until you succeed…DON'T drag innocent people down with you!

I stepped on the accelerator to catch up to the truck to read the license plate number. I could barely keep up but got close enough to see there was no plate, just a truck ID and the company name. According to my speedometer, the truck was going 100 km and I was nervous, so I reduced back to 70 and when we hit Mahone Bay boundary the truck slowed to 50 km so I was able to keep him in sight. He drove into the back of the bank parking lot and I think he was some sort of courier or a Brink’s like vehicle.

When I got back to the shop I was still shaking and phoned the RCMP; told the story and gave them a description of the vehicle. A part of me felt badly getting someone in trouble, it’s not my nature to stir a pot, but this person really shouldn’t be allowed on the road. If they have so little concern for the safety of others the powers that be should strip their license. The officer told me I did the right thing, took my information and said they would check it out. I don’t know what came from it but I sure hope it was addressed.